A six years long period can appear very short or almost eternal, it all depends on the context and on the importance that the concept of time has for everyone. The fact is that Klimt 1918 appear again to the attention of music lovers who are constantly looking for sounds in which melancholy and melody run after each other, without ever winking at an easy usability. After all, just the idea of coming back to the audience with almost two hours of music doesn’t seem to indicate a blatantly commercial choice, in times of disposable listening brought to the extreme consequences; by the way, the music of the Roman band is certainly not something that can be faced with carelessness, despite its apparent lightness: the pop rock of Klimt 1918, now mottled with darkness, now dreaming under the sign of the best shoegaze, enjoys a depth that makes it peculiar, discouraging whoever tries to look for terms of comparison as comfortable as misleading. Sentimentale Jugend is an album that has had a long gestation, and what is most surprising is to learn, from the words of presentation of the same Marco Soellner, how everything manifests itself at such a level of perfection despite a development in such a dilated time and the natural interferences that daily life places on the road of musicians that not always can’t live off their art. Also for this reason, when we are given the opportunity to listen to works of a certain thickness, we should try to empathize with the difficulties faced by our bands compared, for example, to those of Northern Europe, facilitated by state organizations that certainly favor those who want to find an outlet for their artistic nature. Having made the necessary premises, you just have to dive into this vast ocean of notes that, since the title, brings back to a twilight Berlin and a poetic breath that, while inspired by the intentions of the seventies scene of the German capital, draws sap from the Eternal City and the exploration of its darkest meanderings, something that has been successfully done in recent times, even if using different sound coordinates, by other Capitoline bands such as Riti Occulti, Rome In Monochrome or Raspail (the latter connected to Klimt 1918 for the presence of common elements in the line-up). Montecristo, Comandante and La Notte is the opening triptych of the CD Sentimentale, which alone would be enough to ennoble the whole career of hundreds of bands: three different, but equally convincing, ways of interpreting the material, with my personal peak of liking for La Notte, a song sung in Italian marked by a quivering crescendo; the first of the two parts of the work sees Belvedere and the title track as further qualitative peaks, without forgetting the splendid cover of Take My Breath Away, a song composed for Berlin exactly thirty years ago by the most “Berliner” of Italian musicians, Giorgio Moroder. The second CD, Jugend, does not differ much from the previous one from a stylistic point of view, except perhaps a slightly more nervous attitude, well expressed by the sustained rhythms of Sant’Angelo (The Sound & The Fury), preceded however by the airy melodic openings of Ciudad Lineal; here other peaks are The Hunger Strike, a song that enjoys a second part in which the winds are superimposed to a dreamy progression, and the music poetry of Stupenda e Misera Città. In this long track, the voice of the well-known dubbing artist Max Alto interprets the first part of the poem by Pasolini Il pianto della scavatrice over a sound fabric that emphasizes its evocative impact: the tribute to a great poet turns out to be the ideal closing of a work that, right in the poetry, finds its most characterizing aspect, even if it is conveyed by the mostly liquid and soft sounds of shoegaze d’autore. The choice of a production purposely not too much licked increases the obscure potential of a work whose length, if on one side makes more laborious the assimilation, on the other side allows to enjoy a robust turnover of exciting music, without weak moments except, maybe, the song more unbalanced towards the British pop, Nostalghia, but that probably seems to me such more for personal taste than for objective demerits of Klimt 1918. To conclude, a service note useful to the many who (hopefully) will decide to make their own Sentimentale Jugend: the work is available in the complete format in double CD, but Sentimentale and Jugend can be purchased also separately, with two different covers; I think however difficult, and also inappropriate, that someone can opt for one or the other record, given the mentioned stylistic contiguity that unites them, so I strongly suggest not to make too many calculations choosing the complete version, it’s really worth it.

2016 – Prophecy Productions